Chapter 10: Paid in Full

Mara's POV

On the fourth morning I walked the length of the cardiac ward with a nurse holding my elbow, and my repaired heart did not stumble once.

When I got back to the room, Ezra was in the chair.

He had brought a paper bag with two blueberry muffins from the shop across the street.

I sat on the bed and handed him my phone.

"What's this?"

"A transfer confirmation," I said. "Seventy-two thousand dollars, from my account to yours. It went through an hour ago."

He read it and looked up.

"You don't have to."

"It's on the napkin. Repaid in full from whatever Halyard owes me. Halyard paid me." I smiled. "With your money, but they paid."

"Mara. Keep it. You need it for recovery, rent, whatever comes after."

"I'm not keeping your seventy-two thousand."

"It isn't mine anymore. It's yours."

"Then it's mine to give back."

He put the phone down.

His face had gone still in a way I was learning to read. He was hurt, and he was too polite to say so.

"I'm not doing it to be cruel," I said. "I'm doing it so that nobody ever gets to say you bought me."

"I would never say that."

"You wouldn't. Wyatt would. Tripp would. Every man in a fleece vest would say Mara Ostrow's heart was a charity case."

"That's not what I think."

"Then tell me what you did think, in the spring, when you saw the video."

He was quiet.

"That I wanted to give a stranger what my mother never got," he said.

"You wired money to a dead girl's slide."

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